The Luna Park Gazette

My late father always had a strong dislike for the word “interesting.” It was his unshakeable belief—and he had many of those—that this word meant absolutely nothing. If you told him that anything from a movie to a plate of food was “interesting” he maintained that you hadn’t told him a damn thing. I think of the times I've used this word and it's usually when I don't want to come out and say something negative. So, I went to my grammar school reunion on Saturday and it was really… interesting . I hadn’t been to this Catholic school in Brooklyn in years and I decided I would join my sister and some friends and revisit the place where I spent eight years of my childhood. The event was held in the gymnasium, where the school used to put on dances and where Mr. Keating, my gym teacher, once ruled with an iron whistle. I still remember him walking up and down the rows of boys twirling his whistle on a long cord, which would wrap around his index finger and then promptly unwind...

When you’re a police reporter, the scanner becomes your constant companion. That’s where so many stories begin. You’re sitting at your desk, making the daily phone calls to the various police departments you cover, looking for news. And then that scanner starts beeping over your shoulder. The dispatcher calls out the numbers, the codified mayhem that tells you if there’s a fire, car wreck, or armed robbery happening somewhere in your coverage area. You listen for the location, who is responding, and then decide if it’s worth going out there yourself. Some days that scanner can feel a lot like a ball and chain. I was a police reporter at the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, PA for five years starting in 1988 and it didn’t take me long to memorize the important numbers. Back then an armed robbery was a page one story—“page one all the way,” as my editor used to say; but, given the way the Poconos have grown, I don’t think a stick-up rates more than a fewer paragraphs today. There was a brie...

I was making breakfast this morning when I heard a plane fly overhead and I felt a chill go up my spine. That happened a lot in the weeks after 9/11, when every jet coming in for a landing sounded like a missile attack. Of course it was crazy; the plane traveling over my house this morning was flying too high and moving too slowly. It wasn’t like on 9/11, when the jets streaked through the sky and exploded right in front of me. For weeks after that I would look up whenever I heard a jet, half-wondering if it was going to happen again. The feeling gradually faded, but I guess that since this is the ninth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, I shouldn’t be too surprised that I get a little jumpy. Today is also my late father’s birthday; he turned 80 on that terrible day and all I had planned to do that morning was to go home after work and celebrate with him and my sister. Of course we all had no idea that just getting home that day would be such a struggle, that our cit...

I began the summer in a crowd, so it seems only fitting that I would wrap the season up in the middle of a mob scene. It seems like only last week that it was June and I was hyperventilating my way through the throbbing mass of humanity at the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island. And then I turned around and it was Sunday of the Labor Day weekend and I was crammed into a waiting room in the Battery Maritime Building, hoping the Governor’s Island ferry would hurry up and dock before I had a 20-megaton panic attack. I wanted to do something different on this last weekend of summer and I saw that there would be a parked food truck event on the island—it was billed as “Eats from NYC’s best food carts & trucks and specially crafted local beer.” There was also an art exhibit happening on the island as well, so I had a chance to get some culture, stuff my face and drink myself into a stupor. Plus I had never been to Governor’s Island before, so how could I say no? And then I arrived at South S...

What do I know from art? Not much, apparently, but I still had a good time. I went to the Park Avenue Armory on Friday for the last day of a 5-day “Open Studio” featuring the work of Yoshitomo Nara, a Japanese artist who is having a show at the Asia Society . The armory’s website said that the artist and his collaborative team, YNG, “will undertake rebuilding the structure of the installation work, Home , and Nara will establish a temporary studio to create new drawings and other works that will be included in Asia Society Museum’s exhibition Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool .” According to WNYC, “Nara's appearance at the installation on Monday elicited sobs from one of his young Japanese fans; they just managed to drown out the sound of drills and hammers.” Sounds like quite a guy. The site also carried this advisory—which I heard on WNYC as well—“All visitors must wear closed-toed shoes with a hard sole and shirts that cover their shoulders. Hard hats will be provided.” Hard hats? ...

All I wanted to do was buy some turkey. I walked into a butcher shop in Bay Ridge yesterday and found myself in the middle of the Ground Zero Mosque debate. Now, of course, it isn’t a mosque and it isn’t located at Ground Zero, and there already two mosques located in the neighborhood—along with a topless bar. And the politically motivated lies, distortions, and blatant fear mongering being spewed on the airwaves and the Internet bear absolutely no resemblance to a debate. Now back to the butcher shop... I was buying some cold cuts and pasta when the cashier—we’ll call her Maggie—rang up my order and then promptly whipped out a newspaper to show me a story about the first Muslim Miss USA who happens to believe that the Islamic cultural center should move from its planned location on Park Place. "You see," she said. "This woman's a Muslim and she thinks they shouldn't build it there." What this has to do with the price of eggs—or sliced turkey in this case—I ...

Today is my late mother’s birthday and I decided to a little research to see what happened on the day and in the year she was born. I think the most striking thing I learned was that The Wizard of Oz was released on August 15, 1939. This was one of my mother’s favorite movies—she was a huge Judy Garland fan—and it seems fitting that she and this classic film that she loved so much would share a birthday. Apocalypse Now was released on this date 40 years later, but I can’t say my mom was a big fan of this flick. I don’t even know if she ever saw it. Edna Ferber, who wrote Show Boat , was born on this day in 1887. Ben Affleck, Ethel Barrymore, Julia Child, Vernon Jordan, Jimmy Webb, Sir Walter Scott, and Huntz Hall—the guy who played Satch in all those Bowery Boys movies—were all born on Aug. 15. My mother lived through the Depression and on August 15, 1930, Herbert Hoover held a press conference in which he offered plans for relief of people and businesses affected by a series of dev...